A few minutes with Nonlinearcircuits Triple Sloth & Akemie's Castle (An Ode to Vera)
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- Опубліковано 1 вер 2019
- If you are enjoying my music, please checkout my new channel, "Naramata Modular" which is where my solo work will be moving forward. bit.ly/naramatamodular
Sit back and let a few sloths take you on an ambient trip.
The Nonlinearcircuits Triple Sloths is a source of slow modulation for Eurorack. Its voltages rise and fall in obeyance of an analog circuit that follows a (mathematically) chaotic path. Akemie's Castle by ALM is a 4-operator FM synth in Eurorack format.
The Sloth is doing many things, but one of them is to change the FM multiplier of one of Akemie's oscillators, which is what changes the pitch. You can follow the sloth's slow progress on the oscilloscope screen.
Nonlinearcircuits Triple Sloths: nonlinearcircuits.blogspot.com...
ALM Akamie's Castle: busycircuits.com/alm011/
As if your channel couldn't get any more perfect between the awesome animations, explanations, math, and now you hit me with a Firefly reference 🙏🏼❤
amazing. This is the literal sonic representation of the nature of reality as it exists for us. The modules three chaos circuits orbit two strange attractors, following an objectively deterministic path in a highly complex system. But you try and calculate the exact state of the system at some arbitrary point in the future.....you cannot. It seems that despite every point within the system, given a known initial state, being hypothetically calculable, after a certain distance in the future there is only utter chaos to be seen. But what do we do? Drifting aimlessly about our strange attractors, patterns emerge, correlations can be made, things are influenced to a certain degree. We inevitably diverge towards one attractor then then other, a deterministic oscillation, yet to know where exactly one is on that journey is unknowable to us. It seems that free will and determinism exist, paradoxically, at the same time.
*my experience with Triple Sloths in a thought*
Beautifully put.
With headphones it’s amazing
This is the greatest thing I've ever heard with the fewest amount of modules! 🤯😱 well done🙌
I forgot I was listening to this, which is a good thing! Just doing it's thing in the back of my mind. Lovely.
Wow thanks, that's a great review :)
I just watched your Sloths info video and my first reaction was "wow the X and Y outputs would be great for FM stuff, attenuate them just right and it will sound pretty" and here you are doing just that! I'll probably pick up a triple sloth to pair with my Polygogo, its my favorite vco so why not give it a treat.
LOL, that's awesome. I really need to spend more time with Akemie's Castle. I fell pretty hard for the Humble Audio Quad Operator, but the Castle is just so musical sometimes!
Yeah. This is a amazing piece. I love the contrasts between slow and rapid sounds.
Fantastic ambient piece!
this is amazing, just got a triple sloths and want to start doing these slow ambient movements.
This is beautiful. I'm really enjoying it.
I really like this one..Very mellow..i have Eurorack too..actually 2 of them..one for Circuit noise ( Micro Modular ) & a Full Size 84HP that i got from you...i want to create an exotic piece like this....very motivating your composition...Thanks for sharing Jeff
Well done! Thanks for sharing.
Love it!
Just found this. Super nice!
I love it!
This is really gorgeous. Well done.
Thank you so much, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Shiny! Gotta get one.
Such a beautiful video
Thank you! It's still one of my favorites, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Damn Jeff.
Great demo. Great sounds.
High five dude.
Thanks!
I've watched this a few times now, really excellent work dude. Definately a module I need to get.
Thanks! It was one of my first modules and it's still at the center of a lot of my patches. Very well worth it.
@@SoundVoltage I have just ordered one ;)
@@RubiconRecordings You'll love it!
KILLERSLOTH thank you
Actually I‘m already sold for a tripple Sloth because of another Benjolin + Sloth video (and your great instructional video) but this sold me even more - maybe it‘s even time to get the cv-to-midi gear running, but the quantization of Midi probably doesn‘t do justice to this magical voltages..
I love this wonderful ambient piece with such beautiful organic movement. Sorry to ask, as I know you uploaded this a while back, but can you remember which sloth output corresponds to which trace on the data? Also is Maths clocking that regular pulsed tone by opening and closing the VCA? Thanks again!
Thank you!
I can make a decent guess. The three columns of outputs come from three different 'sloth' circuits that run at different rates, but out of order. The left-most is labeled "Apathy" and is actually the 2nd fastest of the three; the middle is "Inertia" and is the slowest, and the one on the right is "Torpor" and is the slowest.
So on the oscilloscope, the fast blue trace will go to the Torpor "X" output (top right); The slow green trace goes to Inertia X (top middle); and the mid-length yellow & red traces go one or the other of the Apathy X and Y outputs.
I think Maths was controlling the modulation one of the inputs on Akemie's Castle. I can go into more detail, depends on how much you want to go into FM synthesis :)
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@SoundVoltage thanks so much for your quick reply. I am just getting into and as a result getting my head around the incredible possibilities of signal (both CV and audio) routing, modulation and permutations available in modular synthesis. Having come from a background of the hardwired signal pathways of traditional analog synths it really has expanded my mind & creative palette! I love getting into FM synthesis! :D
@@cameronjstephen It really is very open-ended, and it really lends itself to in-the-moment experimentation. At least, the way I do it, it would be very difficult to reproduce a performance after the fact -- or sometimes even just 20 minutes later. So you learn to follow what sounds good. And try to remember to hit record. :)
For the FM, you can have one oscillator (operator) modulate another, and I think I had the Maths tweak that level of modulation, which caused it to ramp up sharply and twang like that (if we're talking about the same thing).
@@festuswilliams654 yeah, he wrote like that Inertia the slow not touchable in the middle
Glad to give it the 100th thumbs up
Wow, thank you so much! I've been really surprised at the super positive response to what I thought was mostly just a video of technical interest :) I have the audio itself of the larger session recorded, and I think I'll be putting that up on Bandcamp & Spotify sometime soon.
glad to be No 250, amazing tonal evolution in this video
Have found out what the knobs do? I can look at my scope for hours, but the difference if a low/high Apathy and Torpor I'm not able to find.
It's not at all obvious what they do. I'm not sure there's an easy way to describe it. When you look at the schematic, the sloth circuit is just a few opamps (these kind of 'do the math') and a big capacitor that slowly drains. There's no logic or anything really to control, the circuit is just following a big mathematical curve. All you can really do is nudge the curve around a bit.
The only way I ever use it is that you can sometimes hear a repetition when you're using the fastest sloth, so what I'll do is plug one of the slower sloth outs into the Torpor in, and then it repeats a little but changes over time.
At least I think...maybe I'm imagining it!
@@SoundVoltage Thank you! Reading the schematics is the best way to explain it I think... (I can't read them).
When you plot x and y, you would see it circle around a strange attractor, but I can't really see a preference for one or the other when turning the dials.
I guess I'll consider them a bit like 'random seed' for the paths they make.
@studio48nl I think that's the best way to think of them.
Nice, could explain the patch a bit?
Absolutely. Akamie's Castle has two audio outputs. They are tuned together, one is run into a lush reverb, the other is passed through QPAS with a Maths channel running the VCA, and then into Magneto.
Sloths is controlling a bit of everything. It adjusts the FM multiple on one oscillator, which has the effect of changing the pitch; it also slowly changes the FM level for modulation operators (FM gets tough to explain...) which makes the tones evolve over time. Another Sloths output controls the output level for one of the oscillators, allowing it to rise and fall throughout the piece.
I should have included a patch diagram in the video, I will keep that in mind for next time!
@@SoundVoltage Just got Sloths and delighting in experimenting with it - I'd love to see a patch diagram is you care to share one.
@@ALXMO8 Welcome to the club! Sloths was one of the first modules I ever bought, and it's still at the center of basically every patch.
Unfortunately, this piece was long enough ago that I don't remember all the details except what I wrote a couple of messages above this one. The primary modifiers of the sound from a Sloth standpoint though: 1) Attenuating one way down and using it to change the 'ratio' or 'multiple' value for one of the operators, which results in nice musical pitch changes, 2) I think 2 outputs were varying parts of the QPAS (which I don't have any more).
@@SoundVoltage perfect. Thanks for the information. I've only had Sloths for about a week and it does some strange and wonderful things.
@@ALXMO8 If you haven't already, you'll probably want to park some attenuation next to the Sloths. The CV comes out of the Sloths pretty hot, and if you use it to modulate something directly, you might find it kind of extreme.
Why is "An Ode to Vera" in the title?
Thats the title of the piece
it‘s described at the beginning: he named his favourite module Vera